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July 16, 2014 - Child Care Payment Update

7/16/2014

IDHS continues to provide up to date information on Child Care Assistance program payments. Here is the latest information provided on the Child Care information phone line. (217) 524-9041. To find out when your payment was entered, you usually can use 800-804-3833. That number is supposed to tell of entered payments the working day after entry, approval of a payment the working day following the approval, and generally will tell about issue of a payment two working days after the issue. Unfortunately, 800-804-3833 for some callers, has not been working well lately. Later in this call we will give you some web site that you can use to see approved and issued payments. Licensed providers must enter the IVR case numbers to hear information on their payments. Please refer to the most recent child care certificate or other child care case information for the IVR number.

If you have a question regarding a redetermination, approval, address change, certificate needed, the number of days entered in for a payment, and many other questions, you will need to contact your child care office that takes care of your case. Also, contact the child care office that handles the case for any payment that was issued but was not received, or for those returned undeliverable to The Office of the Comptroller.

For this program, we draw our Federal Child Care funds in the middle of the month each month which allows us to approve and issue the majority of the payments. Some months we still have funds from the previous month that allow us to approve some payments early in the current month. We have had some carry-over funding early in July. With carry over funding DHS was able to approve by July 11th MOST payments entered up to 7/7 and even a small portion of payments entered on 7/8. We note MOST on the approval of entered payments because some payments require extra technical work to process the payments. Our normal mid-month funding is becoming available on July 16th. We expect on July 16th MOST payments not already approved that were entered on July 8th, July 9th entries, and some payments entered on July 10th to be approved by DHS. Funding should remain available through the rest of July. So, we many payments should become approved each day for the rest of the month.

For issued payments, many of the payments that were approved by DHS on July 10th were issued by The Office of the Comptroller on July 14th. With some funding being available we should see approved payments become issued in about 1-3 working days after approval in DHS.

We realize there continues to be some issues with union deduction still being too high for some providers. DHS has reviewed the deductions, and for those providers with too large of a deduction in past union payments, the reimbursement will be to deduct only a small portion of union dues until the total amount owed is covered. The lesser union deduction will start with some payments issued in June, and many more on July issued payments.

The child care payment process is 3 Steps. Your payment is entered into the child care system, when funding is available, and the system has no errors the payment is approved by DHS. After the payment is approved, generally the payment will be issued by The Office of the Comptroller 1-3 working days after the approval. Paper checks are mailed the next working day after being issued. Direct Deposit and debit card payments are in accounts 2 working days after issue. Weekends and holidays are not working days.